House of Parlance Blog

This past week I had the rare opportunity to help launch Cory Doctorow’s new book, Overclocked, during his visit to Vancouver to deliver SFU’s annual Leonard Lecture. I always find it difficult to describe Cory’s work to people who aren’t familiar with it. It’s like all of his great ideas and stories are these amorphous things that float just outside of my vocabulary.  I end up mumbling some vague and inarticulate junk.

Here’s how the Vancouver Sun described Cory in a feature article on the front page of last Saturday’s business section, “…Internet iconoclast: An activist for free use of digital information, and opponent of copyright efforts to strictly control its distribution.” There you go, that’s certainly part of it. But he’s also a shrewd critic and observer of our daily media intake via boingboing, a blog that he edits. And he’s a writer of novels and short story collections including his recent set of stories, Overclocked. And he’s a really nice guy with a million conversational tales.

And he gave me a signed advance galley of his next novel.

This year’s annual SFU Leonardo Lecture was titled The Totalitarian Urge: Total Information Awareness and the Cosmic Billiards and he describes it thus, “It’s about how technology changes the way we view social problems… Older mechanical technologies make us see the world as deterministic, knowable and manipulable. New emergent technologies like the Internet teach us that control is an illusion, the universe is out of control and laughing at us, and that the more we watch and control, the more problems we have.”

The lecture was delivered to a package lecture hall full of both students and members of the general public. Organizers also allowed for overflow into the foyer and provided chairs, speakers and a video feed of the lecture for those people who couldn’t get a seat inside. Some visionary thinking, there.

I urge everyone reading this page to check out podcast Cory’s talk at SFU here. He’s as plain spoken as he is enlightening and he’s really inspiring, too. A real, honest voice out there in the confused cyber-babble.

His personal website is Craphound. His universally exhalted blog is boingboing.